Just experience it

According to the curators, these exquisite allegorical frescoes by 18th-century artist Johann Wenzel Bergl are “recognizable as strategies of absolutist picture propaganda”. And Mark Dion’s installation capturing “the lifestyle and self-image of the prototypical ethnographer of colonial times”, isn’t even that, but alludes “to our own imagination of that ethnographer”. I left feeling rather as Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have felt if, instead of freely stepping through the mirror, she had been shoved through it from behind by a gang of goonish anthropologists.

Visiting mumok, Vienna’s museum of contemporary art, for New Scientist, 23 December 2017